Sin County
Progressives skip the Revolution… again.
On June 23rd, while DSA victories in New York City’s Democratic primaries were giving establishment liberals hives from here to Tel Aviv, in the 25th Congressional district all was as it should be.
Five-term Incumbent Congressman Joe Morelle easily trounced his competition, former Brighton Town Board member Robin Wilt, who gathered only 11,518 votes to his 24,097. (Another candidate, Sherita Traywick, ran an inconsequential campaign and received 2,275 votes). The turnout of 38,041 voters was less than 18% of the district’s registered Democrats.
Being an incumbent never hurts a guy’s chances, of course. But Morelle also benefited from enormous helpings of L3 Harris, Space X, Bloomberg, U of R, AIPAC and AI Super PAC dough — amounting to campaign resources exceeding two million dollars — which annihilated Wilt’s $40 grand war chest. Add to this the non-coverage of the race by our our shamefully indifferent media (Rachel Barnhart has done some good writing on this), and what we got was a victory for machine politics that should settle the stomachs of anyone worried about the commies gaining a foothold in the Greater Rochester region.
“It’s our elected officials that are not meeting the vast majority of the electorate where they are,” Wilt tells me. “And that is because they are bought and paid for by AIPAC and other corporate interests that fuel the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, the corporate media, the insurance industrial complex, and the tech billionaires, to name a few.”
Our primary’s tally ought to be heartbreaking for any local lefty who had hoped for some of that Zohran/Hassan Piker spirit to manifest here in time for the race for Congress. Rochester has a robust protest scene, ranging in degrees of radicalness from the politely upset participants in the No Kings movement to die hard Palestine activists who have kept that flame burning even as Gaza has faded from the news cycle. Anyone ensconced in those circles had to have hoped, however deludedly, that the nationwide progressive wave that included the likes of the Mamdani posse, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Graham Platner (gulp!) would reach our shores.
Unfortunately, as is typical with leftists, no worthwhile bridge-building between their various clans has taken place since Trump’s second term began, leading to no actionable political agenda to affect the primary. So though Robin Wilt shared all the popular Democratic perspectives on ICE, Israel and fascism that ought to have made her a worthy alternative to Joe Morelle (a nakedly transactional and non-ideological party boss), Rochester’s “protest left” ultimately lent little momentum to Wilt’s campaign.
Within hours of cementing his primary win Joe Morelle split our town for DC, concluding the latest of his semi-annual visits to our district. And soon the activists who despise him were back on the street waving around cardboard cutouts of “Genocide” Joe Morelle, the Two Million Dollar Man… an act of defiance suddenly as pointless as lobbing marshmallows at Godzilla.
Joe Morelle’s only remaining challenger is the one he will face in November: his GOP opponent Virginia McIntyre, a county legislator who wears a cross around her neck about half the size of the one Jesus lugged through Jerusalem. After he is done mopping the floor with her the midterm referendum on the Trump catastrophe will wrap and our blue district will return its reddest possible Democrat back to Washington for another two years of doing Israel’s bidding, advancing no progressive agenda and giving handies to the richest men in America.
Green Party of Monroe County candidate emeritus Alex White compares Rochester’s local left scene to Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.“The Palestinian Liberation Front [sic]… they’re asked ‘who do you hate?” And they hate, more than the Romans, the People’s Front of Judea…they’d rather kill each other than go after the Romans.”
“That is pretty much the way I see things going on the left. They would much prefer to fight among themselves than they would to combine.”
White doesn’t have an explanation, much less a solution, for the endemic jealousy that plagues the left. When it comes to why the public doesn’t pick Democratic candidates who support a more progressive agenda, he points to a knee jerk “Vote Blue No Matter Who” attitude that favors whoever the establishment blesses, which always means centrists.
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“The way to win those primaries is to come out on the fringe of the party much stronger by yourself,” says White. “Because the turnout will be relatively low… it’s why you end up with those Democratic Socialists doing much better in places where there is actually a real DSA party, unlike here.”
It must be said, however, that even a DSA candidate needs more than that lucky brand to make it in this town. Wilt, herself a DSA member, certainly did not receive the spotlight that Zohran Mamdani brought to his region’s progressive insurgents.
“I just think DSA’s messaging when it comes to the Black and Brown electorate sucks,” she says. “This was a turn-out election, and we didn’t have the money to turn our voters out…People had to search for my messaging because I didn’t have the money to blanket the district with mailers… The turnout was less than 20%. Apathy won.”
On the surface, Joe Morelle seems like an unlikely figure to wield the influence he has. Hobbity in stature and not at all inspiring on the stump, Morelle is as far removed as you can get from the media prominence of congressmen like AOC or Ro Khanna, and the only legislation he has sponsored that has become law (pulled from an unambitious catalog) was to rename a post office.
However, a low profile is often beneficial to those who choose power over integrity. Morelle has played our region’s game of thrones with skill, and the seemingly moderate figure is less of a boring meat-and-potatoes pol than he is a mob boss out of a Frank Miller comic.
Clearly Joe’s position on the House Appropriations Committee has made him a donor-favorite for the aerospace and finance industries, among others. (He gets a fair amount of union cheddar, too.) But Joe is also thick as thieves with former lieutenant governor and current Rochester Chamber of Commerce president Bob Duffy, as well as being mentor to County Executive Adam Bello.
On top of this, Joe is feathering a nest for his sons, where the apples have not fallen far from the tree. Joe Morelle Jr., the Irondequoit Democratic Committee Chair, recently helped muscle neophyte candidate Kathryn Walker off the ballot for Town Board, threatening her with a specious lawsuit in order to make way for the Morelle machine’s candidate. (It worked.) And Nicholas Morelle, a lobbyist working for Ostroff Associates, used his father’s ties with Adam Bello to help get the county to opt out of a rental registry for Airbnb (an Ostroff client), allowing Airbnb to operate outside the rules that regulate hotels despite essentially being the largest hotel in the county.
So if you were wondering why millions in cash arrived to decimate Joe’s primary opponent when all he really needed were the receipts from a couple of fish fry fundraisers, it is because our district is a casino for corporate interests, and Joe Morelle is their Ace Rothstein.
No surprise then that on the moral issues of the day Joe has mostly checked out… especially when it comes to ICE.
Joe Morelle and Adam Bello have both paid lip service to halting the construction of a detention facility at the Keating Federal Building (though let’s not forget that Morelle signed onto a House Resolution that praised ICE for “defending the homeland”), but the fact is that both are also stand-up guys for pro-ICE Monroe County Sheriff Todd Baxter. And while Rochester mayor Malik Evans may not himself be a Morelle flunky, he publicly withered when challenged by crooked border czar and Locust Club guest Tom Homan to repent of Rochester’s “sanctuary city” ways. This means that if push ever comes to shove, the anti-ICE movement will find that it has few local allies amongst Trump’s supposed opponents.
If you were to poll our district’s Democrats I am certain that a majority would say they would like to see the MAGA movement smothered under a pillow. But clearly very few of them could connect the dots between the abject corruption of the most venal president in American history and the everyday racketeering of our local Democratic mafia. By being on Israel’s payroll, Joe Morelle has raised our gas prices. By being a cutout for the defense industry, he has helped America slide into its newest Forever War. By accommodating ICE he imperils our neighbors and perhaps even our vote. And by being an everyday pay-for-play politician with a brood of Joe-lings beginning to run the show behind the scenes, he validates every act of corruption performed by Donald Trump and his own failsons.
It is for this reason that our local leftists should have gotten their act together and fought to remove Morelle when they saw that the national tide was turning against insulated, incrementalist Democrats. We had a shot at change, but now we are assured of two and a half more years of sameness: the same old graft from Morelle, the same old chants from the Resistance.
Previously: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap!
Jason Yungbluth writes comic books, including one called Weapon Brown.
